"I want to just take a moment to thank the Teabaggers. Thank you so much for helping us pass health care [and] for resurrecting the Obama presidency. I know they're saying, 'Why are you thanking me? I was so against it---I marched on Washington with tea bags hanging off my Founding Fathers costume with a gun on my hip and a picture of Obama dressed as Hitler, screaming about his birth certificate.' And America saw that and said, 'I think I'll go with the calm black man.'" Bill Maher

Saturday, September 29, 2012

Republicans Have Abandoned All Pretense To Morality With Shameful 'Dreams From My Real Father'

After four years of invective, four years during which the right has called President Obama a traitor, a communist, a fraud, an affirmative-action case, a terrorist-sympathizer, and a tyrant, its shrillest voices have been reduced to the most primal insult of all. They are calling Obama’s mother a whore.

For a while now, pictures purporting to show Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, modeling in 1950s bondage and fetish porn have been floating around the darker corners of the Internet. Now, though, they’ve made their way into a pseudo-documentary, Joel Gilbert’s Dreams From My Real Father, which is being mailed to voters in swing states, promoted by several Tea Party groups and by at least one high-level Republican. At the same time, Dinesh D’Souza’s latest book, Obama’s America—the first of all his works to hit the top spot on The New York Times bestseller list—has a chapter essentially calling Dunham a fat slut. If Obama is reelected, it’s hard to imagine where the right goes from here.

It’s tempting to ignore Dreams From My Real Father because it’s so preposterous. The movie claims that Obama’s actual father was the poet and left-wing activist Frank Marshall Davis, who Dunham met through her father, who was a CIA agent merely posing as a furniture salesman. “My election was not a sudden political phenomenon,” says the narrator, speaking as if he were Obama reading his autobiography. “It was the culmination of an American socialist movement that my real father, Frank Marshall Davis, nurtured in Chicago and Hawaii, and has been quietly infiltrating the U.S. economy, universities, and media for decades.”

Davis enjoyed taking nude photos of women, and the images said to be of Dunham, to which the director pays lascivious attention, are presented as evidence of their intimate relationship. “These photos were taken a few weeks before 1960, when Mom was about five weeks pregnant with me,” the narrator says. “Frank then sold the photos to men’s mail-order catalogs.”

What matters here is not that a lone crank made a vulgar conspiracy video, one that outdoes even birther propaganda in its lunacy and bad taste. It’s that the video is finding an audience on the right. Gilbert claims that more than a million copies of Dreams From My Real Father have been mailed to voters in Ohio, as well between 80,000 and 100,000 to voters in Nevada and 100,000 to voters in New Hampshire. “We’re putting plans in place, as of next week, to send out another 2 [million] or 3 million, just state by state,” he told me.

Newsbeast discusses President Obama’s early life and his reelection campaign.

Gilbert won’t say who is funding this distribution, and there’s no way to verify his numbers. Had he not made other right-wing documentaries in the past, I might suspect that the whole thing is a brilliant conceptual art project about the limits of anti-Obama credulity. But the fact is, people are reporting receiving the disc in the mail. Tea Party groups and conservative churches are screening it. It was shown at a right-wing film festival in Tampa during the Republican National Convention, and by Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum Council in Missouri.

What would Republicans do without the politics of hysteria and character assassination. They might have to start actually standing up for something that resembles American values and ideals. And they can't do that because genuine democratic republicanism ( note the small r - Thomas Jefferson started the Democratic-Republicans Party - the beginnings of what has been shorted to the Democratic Party), because that political philosophy, is the opposite of what conservatism stands for.More here, CNN Lets Dinesh D'Souza Peddle Conspiracy Theory That Obama Is "Anti-American"

Noted White Lady Ann Coulter Explains the Black Experience to Whoopi Goldberg. I guess Coulter deserves some kind of kudos. She has not worked for a living during her adult life, yet make enough money to live in Palm beach and hang out at expensive night clubs. She better love America, what other country could she find so many rubes willing to finance her luxurious lifestyle in return for being no more than a bad insult comic.